12 Facts About Placage

Placage was a recognized extralegal system in French and Spanish slave colonies of North America by which ethnic European men entered into civil unions with non-Europeans of African, Native American and mixed-race descent.

Placage became associated with New Orleans as part of its cosmopolitan society.

Placage system developed from the predominance of men among early colonial populations, who took women as consorts from Native Americans, free women of color and enslaved Africans.

Placage often kept a second address in the city to use for entertaining and socializing among the white elite.

Placage had built or bought a house for his placee and their children.

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Placage often took part in and arranged for the upbringing and education of their children.

Placage sometimes taught her daughters to become placees, by education and informal schooling in dress, comportment, and ways to behave.

Placage would be, for twenty years, the placee of a French colonial merchant-turned-planter, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, who was two years her junior.

Placage manufactured medicine, a skill shared by her formerly enslaved sister Marie Louise dite Mariotte and likely one acquired from their African-born parents.

Placage willed her all of his money and property, then worth $12,000.

Placage traveled extensively back and forth to Haiti, where her son by Hardy had become a government official in the new republic.

Placage speculates they developed business acumen from the process of marketing their own bodies.